Reg Nicholson examines old beliefs

Did slavery ever end in the United States?

Well-wishers around the world are looking at developments in the United States with increasing concern.

The continued violence means two things need to be addressed. Urgently. They are the easy accessibility of guns, and the way black men are dying at the hands of police officers.

Older people will recall that racial problems seem always to have been a problem in the United States. Some people regard racism as “America’s Original Sin.”

A new book has been written by Bryan Stevenson, who, I understand, is probably the nation’s main lawyer on mass imprisonment and the death penalty. In the book he writes that slavery never ended. He says it simply just evolved.

Originally, white supremacy served as justification for taking the land from the original inhabitants and for the slavery of black people.

However, white supremacy continues to this day. Racial differences and the accompanying white privilege are a disease that many have been infected with in America.

A national museum is being planned to remember and honour the untold thousands of black-skinned people who were lynched. Soil from each site is being collected and memorialized in glass jars marked with each person’s name, birth and death year, and the town of the lynching.

A black man named Anthony Ray Hinton spent 30 years in solitary confinement on death row in Alabama for a crime he did not commit.

The story of one of the longest-serving death row prisoners in the history of Alabama, despite the obvious evidence of his innocence, so clearly demonstrates the structural and systemic racial and economic injustice of the criminal justice system and its death penalty.

“I didn’t do it,” he told the officer who sat with him in the back of the police car. The officer replied, “Maybe not, but you’ll do.” Then he told the innocent man: “You’re going to be convicted for five reasons. You’re black, a white man will say you shot him, the prosecutor will be white, the judge will be white, and there will be an all-white jury.”

Just recently a poll was taken among supporters of the leading candidate for the Republican nomination. About 20 per cent of the people polled said the freeing of the slaves had been a mistake.